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EW2017 will be accompanied by three tutorials on Design and Evaluation of Highly Reliable Communication Systems, Virtualization, and Network Coding for 5G. The tutorials will be offered free of charge to all participants of the conference.

Design and Evaluation of Highly Reliable Communication Systems for 5G

The 5G vertical sectors eHealth, Factory-of-the-Future (Industry 4.0), Energy and Automotive all depend on highly reliable data communication. Monetary assets or even lives are at stake when communication fails in those domains. Therefore, those systems need to be carefully designed to assure failure free operation for a defined “number of nines”, e.g. 99.999%. It must be assured failures are detected and appropriate action is taken. For most vertical sectors authorities define mandatory certification processes to be passed before entering the marked.
This tutorial provides basic knowledge on reliability engineering including definitions of terms and methods to model and determine system reliability. It also explains how those generic concepts map to communication specific ones suitable for formal 5G evaluation within the ITU IMT-2020 process. Participants will learn about best practices on conducting experiments to assess network reliability in terms of packet losses and delay bound violations accompanied by hands-on sessions. Software libraries allowing to rate the confidence of collected results and providing an estimation on how long experiments need to be executed for a given reliability target will be used.
The goal of the tutorial is to obtain a holistic view and practical approach on how to design a reliable distributed system having in mind that failures are always possible and mitigating their influence is a system wide challenge where data communication is only one piece of the puzzle.

Virtualization and 5G

5G is expected to provide an unprecedented step forward in terms of performance and service delivery, by merging the needs for massive wireless access with the requirements of Internet of Things and Tactile Internet scenarios. To achieve such goal, consensus is growing towards the need for an enhanced infrastructure with a high degree of flexibility and adaptability to service requirements. In this scenario, virtualization techniques represent a concrete solution for providing Quality of Service guarantees, service isolation and real-time adaptation to service requirements.
The tutorial will first introduce the concepts of Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization. Then, 5G requirements and key technologies will be reviewed, providing hints to functionalities and module where virtualization is expected to provide benefits. In particular, the concept and possible architectures for the deployment of a Cloud Radio Access Networks will be detailed and analyzed.

Hacking Network Coding for 5G Systems

5G communication systems are just around the corner. But the new technical requirements in latency, throughput, security, and resilience, together with new architectures such as multi path, mesh, or multi hop, will request for new technologies. One of those new technologies is Network Coding, which has raised a lot of interest in the research community lately and first attempts in standardization bodies are taking place to integrate this ground breaking technology in commercial products. This tutorial will give a short introduction to network coding with respect to 5G, but the main focus is to enable the audience to implement their own ideas either in simulations or in real testbeds. Therefore, the tutorial organizers will present their own software library for network coding. The software library comes with a small simulation environment to test out first simple relaying topologies. The tutorial will show how to embed the software library and to do the parametrization for different scenarios. Understanding the impact of different parameter choices is of critical importance in order to successfully deploy network coding in real networks and on real devices. Throughout the tutorial, the participants will gain hands-on experience with the impact of key parameters such as finite field size, generation size and systematic coding. The tutorial will also show how to implement the software on commercial platforms. Some demonstrators of network coding will be available showing the full potential of network coding in larger testbeds.